After an investor bailed during shooting, a 20-year-old filmmaker spent her entire college fund finishing her award-winning directorial debut

Actress-turned-director Quinn Shephard was 20 when she
made her debut feature film "Blame" in 2015.

The movie went on to win the best actress prize at the
2017 Tribeca Film Festival and later found theatrical
distribution.

Shephard had to cash in her college fund to
self-finance the movie after her sole investor disappeared a
week into shooting.

"It's a really crazy story!"

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That's how 22-year-old actress-turned-director Quinn Shephard
began when she sat down at a coffee shop in Manhattan's East
Village to talk with Business Insider about her feature directing
debut, "Blame" (opening Friday in theaters and On Demand).

Shephard has acted professionally since she was five years old,
and has the personality and looks that could easily get her on an
upcoming series made by The CW, but these days she's more
interested in music rights and color correction. That's because
for the last two years, she has dedicated her life to making a
feature-length movie that's been developing in her mind since she
was 15.

A storyteller since birth

Growing up in Metuchen, New Jersey, Shephard's teenage years were
filled with telling stories. When she was 12 she hand wrote a
300-page novel. It's currently in a binder somewhere in the
basement of her parents' house. Also around that time, she began
to make short films after taking a filmmaking class at school.
Then at 15, after reading "The Crucible," she decided she would
do a feature-length modern retelling of Arthur Miller's classic
play.

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"I've always loved writing," Shephard said. "This movie is me
making something that I really wanted to do since I was a
teenager."

caption

Nadia Alexander in "Blame."

source

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Shephard's script for "Blame" went
through numerous phases in the years before shooting began, but
the basic story was always there - a girl (played by Shephard) is
fixated on her high school drama teacher, and that leads a
jealous classmate to concoct a witch hunt-like investigation to
reveal the alleged taboo relationship.

To get the script from an unmakable 130 pages to a point where
she was able to cast "The Mindy Project" star Chris Messina in
the teacher role, and Nadia Alexander (USA series "The Sinner")
as the jealous classmate (Melissa), Shephard honed her
storytelling technique by writing more feature scripts. She also
made short films, including "Till Dark" in 2015, about a boy's
obsession with his childhood friend.

"Till Dark" was an exciting moment in the process for Shephard.
Many of the crew on the short would make "Blame" with her the
summer of that year. There was finally a light at the end of the
tunnel.

Looking back, Shephard said making "Till Dark" was a great
calling card to land Messina and other key crew members, but in
getting ready for the rigors of feature filmmaking, "it doesn't
prepare you at all" she said.

When everything that could go wrong, does

Shephard produced "Blame" with her mother, Laurie. The only
career experience they had making movies was their time on set as
actresses - Laurie's main highlight was being on a few episodes
of "Days of Our Lives" in 1993; Quinn has been in numerous TV
series and movies since she was five, her biggest being a regular
on CBS' "Hostages" in 2013.

Despite their efforts to land an experienced producer to come on
the movie, it never materialized. This left the Shephards to
learn on the fly what producers do behind the scenes.

"That was her
go-to," Shephard said. "It was that level of ignorance on how to
produce."

Then the movie was hit with what all producers fear the most -
its sole investor suddenly disappeared.

It happened the first week of shooting "Blame." With cast and
crew flown to Metuchen, where the movie would be shot, a wire
transfer of money that was promised to the Shephards never
appeared.

"It was literally, 'Wire transfer coming on Tuesday,' and never
heard from him again," Shephard said (she would not give the
investor's name, only saying he was a filmmaker that she and her
family had known for a long time).

"We never got an explanation, he just ghosted one day," Shephard
continued. "I never heard from him again."

Shephard then had to make a vital decision: pull the plug or
continue on with the movie.

"We felt we couldn't turn back," she said. "This was something we
had spent so many years trying to get off the ground, if we had
to bail on it when we were right there it would have been the
most heartbreaking thing."

Shephard decided to cash in her college fund and take the money
she had from being on "Hostages" to self-finance her movie.

"I felt, I would rather be totally broke than have a broken
spirit," said Shephard, who would not give a specific budget for
"Blame," only saying it is under $250,000.

Finishing the movie at any cost

The money got Shephard through the 19-day shoot - which was
mostly shot in her old high school in Metuchen - but it pretty
much left no funds for post production.

So Shephard edited the movie herself.

Thanks to discounts and in-kind support from a post-production
house in Montreal, and the kindness of a few crew members,
Shephard took two trips to Montreal to edit, score, and do other
post-production elements (sound mix and color correction).

For her first trip, Shephard stayed in the studio of composer
Pierre-Philippe Côté as they created the score. She then lived
with his aunt while editing at the post-production house. On the
second trip, she stayed in the basement of Ilan Bemaman, her
sound mixer.

"The second trip I couldn't afford a plane ticket so I took the
Megabus to Montreal," Shephard said. "I did this thing at any
cost."

The post-production hustle paid off. When Shephard began to show
the movie around people were shocked by its look, which to
someone who doesn't know the backstory looks like it was made for
the high six-figures to $1 million.

"Blame" got its world premiere at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival,
where Alexander won the best actress award for the Melissa role.
Soon after the festival, Samuel Goldwyn Films bought the North
American rights to the movie.

Telling teen stories with adult topics

Alexander told Business Insider she believed it was the comfort
of being directed by someone the same age as her that led to her
acclaimed performance.

"It gives you your own unique power that you wouldn't necessarily
get on a set with a 45-year-old director and producers running
around," Alexander said of working with a peer. "Making Melissa a
lot more crass with the boys was my suggestion to Quinn, so I had
a comfort to come forward and say to her, 'I want to do this with
the character.'"

Actress Sara Mezzanotte, who plays Melissa's friend Sophie, said
she could feel the movie's authenticity right from the pages she
read for her audition.

"I knew immediately that it was written by a young female," she
said. "You can tell when something isn't written authentically. I
could tell this was by someone who understands what it's like to
be a young woman struggling with identity and fitting in."

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(L-R) Nadia Alexander, Quinn Shephard, and Sara Mezzanotte on the set of "Blame."

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Nikolai Vanyo

Shephard is now preparing to
tell her stories on a larger scale.

Following Tribeca, she landed an agent at WME and plans to cut
down her acting considerably to focus on writing and directing.
She said she's close to landing a feature directing project at a
studio as well as a TV project.

"'Blame' is a proof of concept," Shephard said. "It has shown
that there's a place for me to do my genre, which is teens
dealing with adult topics. Giving three-dimensional plotlines to
young women in a way that I don't think is represented right now.
Many of my favorite shows and movies are these complex stories
about middle-aged men. I think it's time to tell complex stories
focused on teenage girls."

Shephard is at that moment in a career when being in the same
room with movie stars, and taking meetings with executives, can
lead to getting too caught up in the glossy side of Hollywood.
But she said she's stayed grounded. She only recently created an
Instagram account, and it was
because she wanted to better connect with teens who are searching
for inspiration.

"I've gotten emails from girls who are 15, 16 years old, who said
they read about me and now have signed up for a filmmaking course
or started working on a script with their friends," Shephard
said. "They said, 'I didn't think there was any point for me
trying to do this at this age because I thought I would have to
go to college or film school.' It's important that we have young
women in the media. I'm not trying to say I'm a role model, but
it's important if you have an opportunity to reach young women
you make them see that they can be businesswomen and run the
show. So if my story makes them feel that in any way then it was
worth it."